Rotating Specific Amount In The Correct Direction on Key Press

Unity Engine
,
1

So I’ve been trying to figure this out most of the day. I’ve searched a ton of forum posts and read several tutorials but none of the techniques I’ve tried works the way I’d like.

I have a 3D sidescrolling style game. I would like to have the player object rotate based on a key press from facing left (Y = 0) to facing right (Y = 180). When going from 0 to 180 it should rotate clockwise and when going from 180 to 0, counterclockwise.

That last bit is where I keep getting stuck. All solutions I’ve tried with Mathf and MoveTowardsAngle, LerpAngle, etc., always rotate clockwise. I have not been able to find any example code rotating an object both ways a specific amount and stopping.

Any help or points to articles would be greatly appreciated. Feeling pretty stuck and out of terms to Google.

2

Solved my own problem, I think. :wink:

Just needed to NOT use the angle versions of those. This is what I ended up with, just in case someone else might find it useful.

if (rotating) {

    float nextAngleY = Mathf.MoveTowards(transform.eulerAngles.y, targetAngleY, rotationSpeed * Time.deltaTime);
    transform.eulerAngles = new Vector3(transform.eulerAngles.x, nextAngleY, transform.eulerAngles.z);

    if (transform.eulerAngles.y == targetAngleY) {
        rotating = false;
    }
}
3

You’re potentially going to have problems comparing floating point. Here’s why:

Floating (float) point imprecision:

Never test floating point (float) quantities for equality / inequality. Here’s why:

https://starmanta.gitbooks.io/unitytipsredux/content/floating-point.html

https://discussions.unity.com/t/851400/4

https://discussions.unity.com/t/843503/4

“Think of [floating point] as JPEG of numbers.” - orionsyndrome on the Unity3D Forums

I always use this pattern:

Smoothing movement between any two particular values:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/812925/5

You have currentQuantity and desiredQuantity.

  • only set desiredQuantity
  • the code always moves currentQuantity towards desiredQuantity
  • read currentQuantity for the smoothed value

Works for floats, Vectors, Colors, Quaternions, anything continuous or lerp-able.

The code: https://gist.github.com/kurtdekker/fb3c33ec6911a1d9bfcb23e9f62adac4

You can see an example of it here in this project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtT1N1lzFns

Specifically here, around line 99 where I set the desiredVisualsFacing based on facing:

https://github.com/kurtdekker/proximity_buttons/blob/master/proximity_buttons/Assets/Demo25DMovement/Level2DFollower.cs

and then line 108 where it lerps towards. I prefer the lerp feel, but you could use MoveTowardsAngle instead.